NYS Writers Institute, November 9, 2006

4:15 p.m. Seminar | Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
8:00 p.m. Reading | Assembly Hall, Campus Center Uptown Campus

James Wood had to cancel

PROFILE
Claire Messud, fiction author, has been called a writer "of near-miraculous perfection" (the New York Times Book Review) with "literary intelligence far surpassing most other writers of her generation" (San Francisco Chronicle). Her latest novel is The Emperor's Children (2006), a satirical tale of the ups and downs of ambitious thirty-somethings in contemporary New York City.

"Claire Messud's remarkable new novel The Emperor's Children is that mythical hybrid that publishers dream of one day finding in the piles of manuscripts on their desks: a literary page-turner." - Kate Roiphe, Slate

"Claire Messud has captured and pinned under glass members of a striking subspecies of the modern age: the smart, sophisticated, anxious young people who think of themselves as the cultural elite…. If you're one of them or if you can't resist the delicious pleasure of pitying them, you'll relish every page of The Emperor's Children." - Ron Charles Washington Post

Messud's previous novels include The Hunters: Two Short Novels (2001), The Last Life (1999), winner of the Encore Award of the Society of Authors, and When the World Was Steady (1994), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The winner of a 2002 Guggenheim fellowship, Messud has published fiction, articles, and reviews in Granta, Zoetrope, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Claire Messud was also a guest of the Writers Institute for the New Voices in Fiction in April of 1999.

Additional links: Times Union Article

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.